Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core i7-1185G7 Review and Deep Dive: Baskin’ for the Exotic
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on September 17, 2020 9:35 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 10nm
- Tiger Lake
- Xe-LP
- Willow Cove
- SuperFin
- 11th Gen
- i7-1185G7
- Tiger King
Section by Andrei Frumusanu
CPU MT Performance: SPEC 2006, SPEC 2017
We’ve noted the earlier discussions of Intel’s TDP handling and how Tiger Lake has 15W and 28W operating modes, and where this comes into play the most is in multi-threaded scenarios where the platform is generally power envelope limited, having to otherwise clock down.
We’re showcasing the MT performance in SPEC for both the Tiger Lake modes, comparing it to both the 15W Ice Lake and AMD Renoir chips. As a note, the 15W Ice Lake platform had a sustained power draw of 18W which makes things not quite as apples-to-apples. Also as a reminder, the Intel systems have 4 cores and are running 8 thread instances, while the AMD system has 8 cores and is running 16 threads.
At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant. This might point out that efficiency isn’t all that much better this generation.
AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads.
In the floating-point results, it’s again a matter of TDP headroom as well as memory performance scalability. In the 15W results, the Tiger Lake chip posts rather small improvements over its Ice Lake counterpart, whilst in the 28W mode the gains are more considerable and even manages to outperform the AMD system more often than not.
In the overall scores, the verdict on Tiger Lake is dependent on how you evaluate Intel’s performance gains. At an (semi)equal-TDP level between Tiger Lake and Ice Lake, the improvements in performance are 17%. Intel does reach a larger 51% generational performance boost in its 28W configuration, but at that point we’re talking about quite different cooling solutions inside of a laptop, no longer making this a valid apples-to-apples comparison.
We haven’t had opportunity to test out higher TDP -HS model of Renoir yet, but with the 15W 4800U already mostly tied with the 28W i7-1185G7, we would expect it to notably outperform the Tiger Lake chip.
Overall, Tiger Lake seems to be offering roughly 20% better performance per watt over its predecessor, with increased performance beyond that coming at a cost of higher power consumption.
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ikjadoon - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
You wrote this twice without any references, but I'll just write this once:AMD is literally moving to custom Wi-Fi 6 modems w/ Mediatek (e.g., like ASMedia and AMD chipsets): https://www.tomshardware.com/news/report-amd-taps-...
PCIe4: it doesn't need to 'max out' a protocol to be beneficial and likewise allows fewer lanes for the same bandwidth (i.e., PCIe Gen4 also powers the DMI interface now, no?).
Thunderbolt 4 is genuinely an improvement over USB4. Anandtech wrote an entire article about TB4: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15902/intel-thunder... (mandates unlike USB4, 40 Gbps, DMA protection, wake-up by dock, charging, daisychaining, etc). Anybody who's bought a laptop in the past two years know that "USB type-C" is about as informative as "My computer runs an operating system."
AVX512 / DLboost: fair, nobody cares on a thin-and-light laptop.
LPDDR5 is likely coming in 2021 to a Tiger Lake refresh around CES. Open game how many OEMs will wait; noting very few of the 100s of laptop design wins have been released, I suspect many top-tier notebooks will wait.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I'd be surprised if the chipset is using gen4 speeds for the DMI or whatever they call it in mobile configurations. The PCIe lanes downstream of the chipset are all still gen3 speed, so there's not much demand for increased IO bandwidth. And last time, Intel took a very long time to upgrade their chipsets and DMI after their CPUs started offering faster PCIe on the direct attached lanes.JayNor - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
4 lanes of pcie4 are on the cpu chiplet, as are the thunderbolt io. They can be used for GPU or SSD.Billy Tallis - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Did you mean to reply to a different comment?RedOnlyFan - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Lol this is so uneducated comment. Telling wrong stuff twice doesn't make it correct.Pcie4 implemented properly should consume less power than pcie3.
Thunderbolt 4 is not USB 4. Only tb3 was open sourced to USB 4 so USB 4 will be a subset for tb3 thank Intel for that.
There are more AI/ML used in the background than you realize. If you expect people to do highly multi threaded rendering stuff.. Why not expect AI/ML stuff?
And 2022 is still 1.5 year away. So amd is entering the party after its over.
JayNor - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Thunderbolt 4 doubles the pcie speed vs Thunderbolt 3 that was donated for USB. Intel has also now donated the Thunderbolt 4 spec.Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
They have 4 (four) lanes of PCIe 4.0 - that provides the same bandwidth as Renoir's 8 lanes of 3.0I get that you're one of those posters who just repeats a list of features that Intel has and AMD doesn't in order to declare a "win", but seriously, at least pick one that provides a benefit.
JayNor - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
The m.2 pcie4 chips use 4 lanes. Seems like a good combo with Tiger Lake. AMD would need to use up 8 lanes to match it with their current laptop chips.Rudde - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Problem is that there isn't any reasonable mobile pcie4 SSDs yet. Same problem with lpddr5. Tiger Lake will get them when they become available. Renoir was released half a year ago; all AMD based laptops will wait for next gen before adopting these technologies anyway.If you want to argue that AMD is behind, highlight what Ice Lake has, but Renoir doesn't have.
Spunjji - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Why would they bother? There are no performance benefits to using a PCIe 4 SSD in the kinds of systems TGL will go into. You can't get data off it fast enough for the read speed to matter, and it has no effect on any of the applications anyone is likely to use on a laptop that has no GPU. This is aside from Rudde's point about there currently being no products that suit this use case.